#and the level 2 viego stealing her strongest unit each round seals the deal

[dravidious]

You're quite amazing

Last night I was like "Ah, 8:20 pm, and I've just finished all my Stuff & Things. Perfect timing to go to bed... I'm gonna write an essay about an update for a free-to-play game."

Thoughts on the Path of Champions Constellation Update

Part 1: The new progression is good

In the past, I've ranted about how the progression systems in Legends of Runeterra's Path of Champions gradually worsen the improvisational deckbuilding aspects of the game. In summary, as you progress, your starting deck and its associated strategy become stronger and stronger, while the cards you get mid-run stay the same power level. As your starting deck improves, adding cards to your deck goes from helpful to detrimental, ruining the feeling of getting stronger over the course of the run.

A recent update to Runeterra added a new progression system called Constellations, with a variety of new perks. Some just add more items to your starting deck, and each champion has at least 1 new starting power that further emphasizes their default playstyle, both of which further contribute to the problem. However, two notable perks help to alleviate the problems: Star of Discovery and Star of Legends.

These perks both do mostly the same thing: Add items to cards you get mid-run. Star of Discovery adds a certain item to a certain category of card, such as units from a specific region, or spells of a certain mana cost. Star of Legends adds an item to your support champion. The items given by these perks synergizes with the champion's default strategy, which is something I criticized in the past; building a deck of random cards feels less significant if it's always playing the same strategy.

However, these perks are a definite improvement to the improvisational gameplay. Path of Champions isn't a game about improvising a strategy; it's right there in the name, you choose a champion with a specific playstyle. But that model has always been flawed; in the early game with no star powers or starting items, you rely a lot on card rewards, and you might not get the cards needed to actually play your champion's strategy. In the late game with a powered-up deck and star powers boosting your strategy, you're forced to clog your deck with weak cards that don't synergize with your starting tools.

These perks solve the issue beautifully: By powering up the cards you get mid-run and making sure that they synergize with your champion's strategy, you get the best of both worlds, improving your deck over the run while still getting to play the strategy you wanted to. The deckbuilding used to get worse and worse as you progressed, but they've managed to make it so that progressing enough eventually loops back around to making it good again.

Part 2: Everything about this update is a fucking mess

The new champion released in this update, Viego, has a spell in his starting deck called Possession. As one of his level up rewards, it gets the item Nomad's Medallion, which gives -2 cost. One problem: It doesn't fucking work. After getting this reward, playing a run will reveal that Possession still costs its default 5 mana. It just doesn't fucking work. At all. How the fuck did this not get caught in testing?

Possession + Nomad's Medallion is far from the only mistake in this update. Pretty much everything added has some mistake that came with it. For example, they went back and added new rewards to old adventures, but players who had already gotten all the old rewards would be unable to get any of the new ones. The good news is they've fixed this one. The bad news is that this is the only mistake they've fixed so far.

There's a new weekly quest that rewards you for winning 3 weekly adventures. Background: Weekly adventures are randomly generated adventures that give a reward the first time you complete them. They come in sets of 3, and a new set of 3 replaces the old set each week. Problem: The weekly quest refreshes on wednesday, while the weekly adventuers refresh on monday. That means that either A) You have to wait 2 days before doing any of the weekly adventures, B) You have to do all 3 weekly adventures within monday and tuesday, or C) You have to do one or more of the weekly adventures twice, without getting any rewards for the 2nd run.

Viego has another bug, in his 2nd star power. The power says "Whenever an ally with 4+ power dies, reduce the cost of units in hand with 4+ power by 1." The cost reduction actually only applies to units in hand with 5+ power, so either the power has a typo or the programmers messed up. This is especially egregious because Viego has a unit in his starting deck with 4 power, so basic testing should have revealed this bug.

Daily quests now give a "bronze cosmic vault" which gives 5-10 fragments of a random champion, but they didn't add a vault opening animation for this one, so you can't tell what champion you got the fragments for or even whether you got any fragments at all. You DO get the fragments, it just doesn't tell you. Speaking of fragments, they also broke the "upgradable" notification.

Oh lord, the upgradable notification. Background: You upgrade champions by spending fragments of that champion. You also get wild fragments, which can be spent on upgrading any champion. Before, when you had enough champion fragments to upgrade that champion, the champion select button would glow, and the champion you can upgrade will be moved to the top and glowing with the label "upgradable". This is very useful, and not annoying at all because there's no reason not to upgrade a champion when you have enough of their fragments to do so. It's not like you can spend their fragments on anything else. Obviously, this doesn't consider wild fragments, because that would be stupid; not only is it likely that you want to save up your wild fragments for a certain champion, but giving an upgradable notification for any champion that you could upgrade with wild fragments would make literally every champion "upgradable" once you have enough, making the notification completely useless.

The upgradable notification now takes wild fragments into account.

This is almost certainly a mistake, and a quirk of the new upgrade purchasing UI that came with the Constellations update. But for all of this, every little messy aspect of this update, you have to ask: How did this happen? How did they fuck this up? How rushed was this update that they couldn't find and fix these issues? What the fuck is happening? Is the dev team working off a budget of $2 and a bag of peanuts?

Part 3: Free-to-play games suck

I was thinking about how I'm definitely never giving this game any money when I thought "Well, what if there was an Unlock Everything button that costed $5? Or even just $1? I'd probably buy that so I could… Wait. What would I do then?" I realized that I've spent so much time playing this game just to Make Progress and Get Things that I don't even know what I'd do if I actually had all the things I wanted. I realized that this game is an evil treadmill of FOMO and daily quests that has no purpose other than to drain as much of my time (and ideally money) away as possible. And I fucking fell for it like a chump.

I have so many games, real games that let me play at my own pace, sitting in my Steam library, yet here I am grinding for hours on this treadmill because I don't want to miss a daily quest. I am going to uninstall this game.

After I clear the "Beat Lissandra with Viego" quest because it has a time limit and gives a big fat diamond vault but AFTER THAT I'M QUITTING FOR REAL I PROMISE!

Epilogue: Ultrakill

Even since long before I bought it, Ultrakill has been a fascinating game to experience. I HATE spending money, so I naturally drift toward free-to-play games, but these games often have grind treadmills meant to tempt you into skipping them with microtransactions. Even some real games with no microtransactions have grindy progression mechanics, such as Monster Hunter and most RPGs. I've mostly grown numb to it and just accepted that this is how games are.

It's not, that's a lie, and Ultrakill is the greatest counterexample of all time.

Being as cheap as Mr. Krabs, I first experienced Ultrakill through its demo. Now, Ultrakill is a game with very little progression; the demo has 2 weapons that cost currency to buy, but they're super cheap, you'll get enough to buy them just by playing through the demo levels. There's no grind. Just 6 levels.

I played those 6 levels so many times. I played them until I P-Ranked them, and then occasionally I would just boot up the demo and play through it all again. I had everything, all 2 unlockable weapons, and even all the non-mechanical stuff; the secrets, the P-Ranks, the bonus challenges. There was NOTHING for me to get, but I kept playing anyway, because the game is fucking fun. I want to play games like that. Games where you run out of things to chase, and still keep playing because the game is fun. Rhythm games are a great example; no stats to level up, no weapons to obtain, just pure gameplay. Racing games are another; I've had a blast playing F-Zero GP Legend, just booting it up every now and then to play a quick Grand Prix.

Even games that have progression can play like this sometimes, like my many, many playthroughs of Tales of the Abyss. And games that have a story mode with a clear endpoint are also appealing. I want games where the progression is finite, where you're expected to reach the end, not just keep grinding for currencies on an endless treadmill. Because the best way to know that you truly love a game is when it runs out of things to give you, but you still keep playing.

Okay essay over I just have a thing to put at the end here because this morning I beat Lissandra on my very first try

Stole her own OP Watcher, and even if I had only killed it instead I think I still would've won lol

Finally uninstalled the game afterward. Goodbye.